Volume 5 - Number 3 Explore this issue

Spring 2025 Issue

Explore this issue
explore all issues

In the Spring 2025 issue: Yaroslav Hrytsak on the surprising lessons of setting the Ukrainian war in the context of history; David Bell asks if we shouldn’t still believe in the enlightenment; Durs Grünbein shares cautionary echoes in prose and poetry; Clifford Thompson argues for reviving an honest view of race; Alfred Brendel notes some of the ungenteel qualities of Papa Haydn; Agnes Callard investigates what we see when we look at colors; Enrique Krauze explains what happens when a hunger for power destroyed a democracy; James Traub investigates journalism’s tangled relationship with truth; Jaroslaw Anders makes a cautionary tale from the the trajectory of Polish poetry; Gary Saul Morson warns of the danger of ready-made beliefs, and Kenda Mutongi of the use and abuse of magical thinking; Celeste Marcus asks what the American Jew owes her country; Leon Wieseltier muses on the slumber, and slow destruction, of liberalism in America and Israel; and poetry from David Grossman, Paula Bohince, and Karl Kirchwey.

You’ve read of free articles this month.
For full access to Liberties Journal, click here to become a subscriber today.

It’s like a meteor of intelligent substance that landed on my desk.

Thomas L. Friedman

A triumph for freedom of thought.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Liberties sure is needed in these times.

Bill Maher

Liberty is under threat and Liberties girds us for the fight.

George Stephanopuolos

Something was missing in our culture, and here it is.

Tina Brown

Invaluable.

David Brooks

Liberties: Some serious food for thought.

Christiane Amanpour

Liberties is THE place to be.

Wynton Marsalis

A murderers row of important, fortifying, and inspiring writers.

Aaron Sorkin

Liberties opened my mind to subjects unfamiliar and points of view unexpected. I am hooked.

Ralph Fiennes

Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts — old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Ryan Ruby: Context Collapse

Ryan Ruby discusses his new book Context Collapse with Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus.

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus Discuss Immigration under Trump

What will immigration look like over the next four years?

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus discuss what immigration policies will look like in the next Trump administration.

View All Podcasts



Liberties Sidebar

Van Gogh the Translator

by

July 2025

“When I entered the room in Hôtel Drouot where [drawings] by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875)] were exhibited, I felt something akin to: Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” This is what Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) wrote to his brother, Theo, in June 1875, about one...

Read More Read More

Picasso in Tehran

by

June 2025

A woman in her late fifties, dressed in a black chador with a small sun hat, accompanied by her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter — a girl of about four or five years in a white floral dress — journeyed to Tehran to spend the Nowruz holidays away from the hustle and bustle of the pilgrimage...

Read More Read More

How to Spell Syria

by

June 2025

For many people, a country is a source of identity: a constant, a flag, a constitution. But what happens when you live through a revolution? What happens when your life cracks open at history’s fault line? Since the fall of Assad six months ago, Syrians have been engaged in deep, wide-ranging conversations about the future...

Read More Read More

Gaza and the Illusion of Escape

by

June 2025

My family and I are victims of this bloody conflict. Please help us find a safe way out of Gaza and save my family. Please share this message. This short plea was written on a battered phone from a makeshift tent in one of Gaza’s displacement camps — by someone whose only wish is to...

Read More Read More

Ruins

by

June 2025

All matter doesn’t matter. Which is hard to believe  when two years I sat wedged  in a corner office stapling papers and prying them open. I was used to it. Used to  compiling edge to lascivious edge.  At week’s end I went to the cask like everyone else.  What I inhaled was the body asking...

Read More Read More

Teaching and Democracy in America

by

June 2025

Every year, hundreds of thousands of college students enroll in a course whose title is something like “Principles of Comparative Politics” or “Introduction to Comparative Government.” These are bread-and-butter courses for any modern political science department, but they aren’t the flashy or sexy ones. Students who study government and political science normally come to these...

Read More Read More
Read more

Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts ��� old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Ryan Ruby: Context Collapse

Ryan Ruby discusses his new book Context Collapse with Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus.

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus Discuss Immigration under Trump

What will immigration look like over the next four years?

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus discuss what immigration policies will look like in the next Trump administration.

View All Podcasts



Log In Subscribe
Register now